Rich Text Document (draft of September 2010)
Mannequins
HIS VENTURE into bird keeping was the last explosion of colourfulness, the final magnificent counter-march of fantasy that my father, that incorrigible improviser, that fencing champion of the imagination, was to lead on the ramparts and trenches of a barren and empty winter. Only today do I understand the lonely heroism with which he gave single-handed battle against the boundless element of boredom numbing the town. Bereft of all support, without acknowledgement on our part, that astonishing man had defended the lost cause of poetry. He was a wonderful mill, into whose hoppers the bran of the empty hours was poured, bursting into bloom in its mechanism with all the colours and aromas of oriental spices. But we, having grown accustomed to that metaphysical prestidigitator’s magnificent jugglery, were inclined to take for granted the blessing of his sovereign magic, which had delivered us from the lethargy of our empty days and nights. Adela was given no reproach for her mindless and brusque vandalism. Quite the reverse, we felt a kind of base gratification, an appalling satisfaction in the curbing of those ebulliences, which we had avidly savoured to the full, only to withdraw perfidiously from our responsibility toward them. And perhaps in that treason there was also a secret prostration before victorious Adela, to whom we indistinctly ascribed some mission, a duty toward powers of a higher order. Father, betrayed by all, withdrew without a struggle from the sites of his recent glory. With no crossing of swords, he surrendered the domains of his former magnificence into the hands of the enemy. A voluntary exile, he retreated to an empty room at the end of a corridor, and entrenched himself there in solitude.
We forgot about him.
The mournful greyness of the town surrounded us on all sides once more, a dark lichen of dawns and a parasitic fungus of dusks overgrowing the windows, maturing into a downy fur of long winter nights. The wallpaper in the apartment, blissfully unrestrained in those former days, and receptive to the coloured flights of those winged assemblies, closed in on itself once more and grew tangled, intertwined with the monotony of bitter monologues.
The lamps blackened and sagged like old teasels and musk thistles. They hung dejected and acrimonious now, quietly tinkling their glass crystals whenever anyone passed gropingly through the murk of the room. Adela inserted a coloured candle into every arm of those lamps, to no avail—ineffectual surrogates, they were a pale reminiscence of the magnificent illuminations with which those hanging gardens had so recently bloomed. Oh! where was that twittering budding, that rapid and fantastic fructification in the bouquets of those lamps, from which those winged phantasms had risen up as if from magically bursting cakes, splitting the air into magical packs of cards, scattering it into colourful rounds of applause, and pouring out thick flakes of sky blue, peacock and parrot green, metallic sparkles, drawing lines and arabesques in the air with the shimmering traces of their flights and wheels, unfurling coloured fans of flutters which hung long after the flight in the rich and spangled atmosphere? Even now, deep within that greyed aura, the echoes and possibilities of colourful flares were hidden, but no one penetrated with a flute or tested with a drill the clouded grain of the air.
Those weeks stood under a banner of strange sleepiness.
Beds left unmade all day, engulfed in crumpled bedclothes, dragged around in our arduous sleep, stood like richly cushioned boats, ready to sail out into the watery and convoluted labyrinths of some black and starless Venice. Adela brought us coffee in the hushed dawn. We dressed lazily in cold rooms, by the light of a candle mirrored many times over in the black panes of the windows. Those mornings were filled with incoherent comings and goings, a protracted search in different drawers and wardrobes. The clacking of Adela’s slippers was heard all through the apartment. The shop assistants lit their lanterns, took the huge shop keys from Mother’s hand, and went out into the dense, swirling darkness. Mother could not come to terms her morning toilette. The candles died out in their sockets. Adela was lost somewhere in far removed rooms, or in the attic where she hung the washing. No amount of calling could summon her. The still tentative, dull and dirty fire in the stove licked the cold and shiny excrescences of soot in the chimney’s throat. A candle went out, and the parlour was plunged into darkness. With our heads lying on the tablecloth, amid the remains of breakfast, we fell asleep, half dressed. With our faces sunk into the furry belly of the darkness, we sailed away on its undulating breathing, into starless nothingness. Adela’s noisy tidying awoke us. Mother could not complete her morning toilette. Before she had finished brushing her hair, the shop assistants had returned for dinner. The gloom in the market square took on a hue of aurous smoke, and for a moment from those dull ambers, those smoky meads, the colours of a most beautiful afternoon might have been unveiled—but the auspicious moment passed by, the amalgam of daybreak died, and that rising ferment of the day, almost within reach, fell back and returned to feeble greyness once more. We all took our places at table. The shop assistants rubbed their hands, red from the cold, and their prosaic conversations at once gave rise to the whole day—a grey and empty Tuesday, a day with no tradition or face. But when a plate of fish in glassy aspic appeared on the table, two large fishes lying side by side, head to tail like the figure from the zodiac, we foresaw in them that day’s coat of arms, the calendar emblem of that nameless Tuesday; and we hastily carved it up among ourselves, full of relief that in this way the day had regained its physiognomy.
The shop assistants consumed it with unction, with the solemnity of a calendar ceremony. A peppery aroma spread over the room. And as they mopped up with pieces of bread the last of the jelly from their plates, turning over in their minds the heraldry of the next few days of the week—and when on the dish only the heads remained, swimming in the gelatine of their eyes—then we all felt that the day had been conquered by our combined efforts, and its remains were unworthy of our further consideration.
Adela made no great ceremony over those remains, surrendered in effect to her mercy. Amid the clattering of pots and the swishing of cold water, she energetically liquidated those few hours until dusk, which Mother slept through on the ottoman.
Meanwhile, in the dining room, the evening’s scenery was already being prepared. Polda and Paulina, the seamstresses, were arranging matters in there with the apparatus of their craft. A taciturn, unmoving lady entered the room, carried in on their shoulders, a lady of straw and canvas with a black wooden orb in place of a head. But when she was set down in the corner, between the door and the stove, that silent lady immediately became the mistress of the situation. From her corner, standing motionless, she supervised the girls’ work in silence. Full of criticism and disfavour, she censured their pains and blandishments, whilst they knelt before her, measuring fragments of cloth marked out with white basting thread. They attended with patience and concentration to that taciturn idol, whom nothing could appease. That moloch was as implacable as only female molochs can be, and she set them to work over and over again, whilst they, as spindle-shaped and slender as the wooden spools from which they unwound their thread, and no less mobile, tinkered with deft movements over that heap of silk and wool. Their scissors clinking, they cut their way into its colourful mass; they set the sewing machine whirring, treading its pedal with a cheaply patent-leather booted foot; and a pile of off-cuts steadily grew around them, shreds and tatters of all colours, like husks and chaff spat out around a pair of fussy and extravagant parrots. The angled jaws of their scissors opened with a squeak, like the beaks of those colourful birds.
The girls trod incautiously over the colourful trimmings, wading indifferently as if in the debris of some would-be carnival, the lumber rooms of some great unrealised masquerade. They shook off the tatters with a nervous laugh. They tickled the mirrors with their eyes. Their hearts and the rapid sorcery of their hands were not in those boring dresses that lay on the table, but in those hundreds of fragments, those flippant and frivolous shavings with which they might shower the whole town, like coloured, fantastic snow. Suddenly they felt hot, and they opened the window in the impatience of their solitude, in their hunger for unfamiliar faces, hoping to glimpse at least an anonymous face pressed against the glass. They fanned their flaming cheeks before the winter night swelling the curtains. All rivalry and mutual acrimony, they displayed their burning décolletages, either one of them ready to put up a fight over that Pierrot that the night’s dark breeze might blow in through the window. Ah! how little they demanded from reality—they held everything within themselves. They had a surfeit of all things within themselves. A Pierrot stuffed with sawdust would have sufficed for them—only the word or two that they had so long awaited, so that they might fall into their long-prepared role, stamped long ago on their lips, a wild transport full of sweet and terrible bitterness, like the pages of a romance devoured in the night, tears pouring down their flushed cheeks.
During one of his nocturnal wanderings about the apartment, hazarded in Adela’s absence, my father chanced upon that quiet eventide assembly. He stood for a moment in the darkened doorway of an adjoining room, holding a lamp in his hand, enchanted by that scene full of fervour and blushes, that idyll of face powder, coloured tissue-paper and atropine, behind which the winter night breathed in the midst of the swelling curtains like a backdrop full of meaning. Putting on his spectacles, he approached the girls in a few steps, and strode around them, illuminating them with his upraised lamp. A draught from the open door swelled the curtains at the window, whilst the young ladies, swaying their hips, allowed themselves to be seen, the enamel of their eyes twinkling along with the lacquer of their squeaking slippers, and the clasps of their garters under skirts lifted by the wind. Tatters began to fly like rats across the floor, toward the half-open door of the dark room, whilst my father intently scrutinised those snorting young ladies, whispering in an undertone: ‘Genus avium... if I am not mistaken. Scansores or pistacci... Noteworthy in the highest degree.’
This chance encounter was to be the first of a whole series of gatherings, in the course of which my father enchanted both of those young ladies with the charm of his astonishing personality. And in exchange for his chivalrous and witty conversation, which filled the emptiness of their evenings, the girls allowed him, the ardent scholar, to study the structure of their slender and tawdry bodies. It all took place during the course of his lecture, with solemnity and refinement that relieved even the most daring points of those investigations of the equivocalness of their appearances. Pulling Paulina’s stocking from her knee, and studying with enrapt eyes the compact and noble construction of its joint, my father said: ‘How full of charm and how favourable is the form of existence you ladies have assumed. How beautiful and simple is the thesis entrusted to you, to reveal with your lives. But with what mastery, my ladies, with what finesse do you acquit yourselves of that task! If I were to cast aside respect before the Creator, and make a jest in criticism of creation, then I should demand: “Less content, and more form!” Oh, how that loss of content would unburden the world! More modesty in purposes, more restraint in claims, gentlemen demiurges, and the world would be more exquisite!’ cried my father as his hands were laying bare Paulina’s white calf from the fetters of her stocking. Just then, Adela, carrying a tea tray, came to a halt in the open doorway leading to the dining room. This was the first meeting of the two enemy powers since the occasion of their great contest. Having been in attendance at that encounter, we experienced a moment of tremendous fear. It was unutterably distressing for us to bear witness to yet another humiliation of an already so grossly afflicted man. Greatly abashed, may father got up from his knees; his face was tinged, wave after wave, with an ever darkening influx of shame. But Adela was found to be unexpectedly equal to the situation. Smiling, she strode up to Father, and flipped his nose. At this signal, Polda and Paulina clapped their hands with glee, stamped their feet, and danced Father around and around the table, hanging onto his arms at either side. In this way, thanks to the good-heartedness of the girls, the germ of an unpleasant conflict was dissipated in general gaiety.
Here begin the highly interesting and strange lectures that my father, inspired by the charm of that small and innocent audience, conducted in the succeeding weeks of that early winter.
It is worth noting how all things that came into contact with that unusual man would retreat, as it were, to the root of their being, rebuild their phenomenon down to the metaphysical core. They returned, as it were, to their primordial idea, only to betray it at that point and lurch into those dubious, daring and equivocal regions which I shall here succinctly call The Regions of the Great Heresy. Our heresiarch walked like a mesmerist in the midst of things, infecting and seducing them with his dangerous charm. Am I also to call Paulina his victim? She became his pupil in those days, a disciple of his theory and the model of his experiments.
I shall attempt to set out here, with due circumspection and avoiding scandal, that most heretical doctrine, which possessed my father at that time, throughout the long months, and governed all of his actions.
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